An Armenian Sketchbook (14 page)

What these two men had in common was—paradoxically—how little either had in common with his predecessors. Martirosyan had nothing in common with the hungry, tubercular, ardent revolutionaries of earlier decades; and Vazgen, for his part, was certainly not the kind of man to go to the stake preaching the word of God in a state of joyful illumination.

These two men were representatives of two of humanity’s greatest ideas: the Kingdom of Heaven, and the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.

I have often heard or read about people feeling anxious before meeting some great man. And then, the moment they come into the presence of Tolstoy, Lenin, or Einstein, they calm down, realizing that the great man is kind, straightforward, and considerate—and that he is not unlike other such people they know.

But this is not what I felt with regard to the catholicos. Discovering that Einstein is kind and straightforward has never made anyone doubt his genius.

Vazgen I, on the other hand, was clearly not a great man. I calmed down not because he was kind and considerate but because I realized that he was unremarkable. I had already met many people like him.

I sat there, full of petty worldly vanity, trying to memorize details of our conversation and thinking about my Moscow friends: Soon I would be telling them how I drank coffee with Vazgen I, the Catholicos of All Armenians, and talked about Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy with him. I might have been preparing to review a show.

We said goodbye; our meeting had lasted twenty minutes. The handsome monk in the black pointed hat escorted us to the car. He walked beside Martirosyan, talking and laughing. He was no longer on stage. And I thought about how I would like to be photographed with this monk against the background of the cathedral, that it was a pity no one had photographed us with Vazgen—and how eloquently I had spoken about literature and churches.

We passed a blind beggar. His face was full of misery; it was the face of Job. We passed a peasant walking towards the cathedral with a sheep on a length of rope; there was something terrible about the sheep’s submissive anticipation of death. I looked at the handsome monk beside us; the god of kindness and compassion had not even touched his wonderful countenance. As we walked past the muttering old man and the doomed animal, the monk was still laughing.

Six weeks after this meeting I went to visit Ivan, the boiler man. I wanted to meet his father, Aleksey Mikhailovich, a Molokan elder.

It was a winter evening and we were walking along the steep, snow-covered streets of Tsakhkadzor. Snow in the high mountains is different from other snow; it is lighter and fluffier.

Ivan was silent, and so was I. I was feeling depressed. Walking on fresh snow is hard work; I was starting to wheeze. We were walking down a long and very steep street, and I did not relish the thought of having to walk all the way back up again through deep snow.

Finally, stepping over a dilapidated fence, we entered a yard and walked past a small dog that barked at us without conviction. Then we went past some sheds thrown together out of rusty tin and old boards. I sensed the warmth of sheep manure and the smell of a henhouse. This smell remained equally strong even after we went into the dimly lit entrance room.[
52
]

Then and there, we seemed to leave Armenia. There was no longer any sense of the mountains, of the Araks River, of our nearness to the Turkish border. Everything was entirely Russian, as if from a Russian village: the floor beneath our feet, the half dark of the entrance room, the water barrel, the tin cup standing on a bucket covered by a piece of plywood.

We entered the main room. Dear God, there we were, back in village Russia. We were somewhere near Kursk, somewhere near Oryol. There was a large Russian stove and a perfectly made bed with perfectly smoothed pillows; in one corner there was a plain unpainted bench. Village Russia, southern Russia, where the Lgov region borders the Glukhov region, where Oryol borders Sumy, where Voronezh borders the Svatov steppe. Yes, at first I thought that there was something of the Ukraine in the walls bleached with lime, in the dirt floor, in the patterned hemp cloth on the wall above the bed, in the look of the entrance room. After a while, though, I realized that this was less a hint of the Ukraine than a hint of Armenia.

The Russian log hut. How much thought have scientists and thinkers given to it? Has anyone studied the paradox of its great diversity and its great uniformity, its constant evolution and its limitless conservatism? Has anyone written books about the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of kinds of Russian stoves? Here are the Volga stoves—from Kamyshin, from Saratov, all similar, as if in accord with some rigid mathematical law. Who remembers the master craftsman who created them all? Nowhere did he write, “Remember my name in your prayers.” Yet what quantities of bread, what a great deal of cabbage soup, how much living warmth his stoves have given birth to! And then the realm of Volga stoves comes to an end, and the realm of Voronezh stoves begins. Everything is the same, and everything is somehow different: the stonework, the chimney, the sleeping bench above the stove. Here a different master has created his own laws and expressed his own character, but he too never dared to write, “Remember my name in your prayers.” And now come the Kursk and Oryol stoves; they too suddenly take over, reign, bake their bread—and then, as if exhausted, no less suddenly abdicate. An invisible chieftain unites whole districts and provinces under the banner of his own particular kind of Russian stove, and then comes a boundary—and we find a new stove chieftain creating stoves in his own image and likeness. And so we come to the huts of the Far North—of Vyatka, Arkhangelsk, and Vologda.

And somewhere in eastern Siberia, in the very easternmost Far East, someone exclaims in astonishment, “But these are our very own Poltava stoves, our very own Volynia stoves, our very own hearths, our very own sleeping benches!” It is remarkable: After traveling thousands of miles in slow creaking carts, Russian settlers carefully re-create their own particular kind of stove. For hundreds of years they defend their stoves from the constant onslaught of other influences, from new-fangled modernist stoves, from decadent stoves, from pagan stoves.

And it may well be that the same laws hold sway in Canada or in Ukrainian settlements in Brazil—the same laws for the construction of stoves, the frames of log huts, their roofs and entrance rooms.

Someone from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs told me that an old woman, a toothless half-Indian old woman in the Amazon jungle, anxious about her grandchildren, was once heard to tell her daughter-in-law to close the window in an improbable hotchpotch of English and Russian: “
Zachini vindovy, or childrenyata zasickuyut
.” The stability of people’s inner worlds, the stability of their forms of speech, of their habits, customs, and household utensils can withstand vast expanses of ocean, equatorial heat, and tropical jungle, the power of a vivid, noisy alien life that continues its attacks for decades and centuries.

Here in Armenia, I witnessed the extraordinary steadfastness of the Russian stove, the Russian hut, the Russian porch, the Russian entrance room.

Then I said to myself, “No, it’s not a matter of stoves and cooking pots but of people’s inner being. What matters is not the hut—what matters is that Ivan lives in this hut.”

And yet Ivan spoke Armenian so well that the Armenians themselves envied him his huge vocabulary, his pronunciation, his knowledge of the nuances of village dialects, the wealth of Armenian catchphrases, sayings, and little rhymes he was able to draw on.

Martirosyan told me that Ivan’s knowledge of Armenian was perfect. Ivan’s friends were all Armenians; he drank with Armenians; he went hunting with Armenians; he ate Armenian soups.

But then we entered the hut, and I met Nyura, Ivan’s friendly and beautiful wife. And sitting on the stove were Ivan’s four fair-haired children—two boys and two small girls. The children were quiet and well behaved; their bright little faces all turned towards me. We talked about fairy tales. The children were able to keep up a serious conversation about Ivan Tsarevich, Ivan the Fool, the Firebird, Brother Ivanushka and Sister Alyonushka. And in the mountains of Armenia there was something especially touching about these children sitting on a Russian stove, about their quick eyes and flaxen hair, about our sweet and serious discussion of Russian fairy tales. They were splendid children—quiet but not timid. Ivan, standing beside the stove, was looking at them with a tenderness and love I had never before sensed in him. In my mind this hut, and Ivan, and his children, and the fairy tales of old Russia all became one; it was here that I first truly sensed the Russianness of a man whose father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had all lived out their lives in the mountains of Armenia.

Then Ivan’s parents came into the room—old Aleksey Mikhailovich and his wife, Maria Semyonovna. They were real old villagers. Aleksey Mikhailovich had gray hair, a dark weather-beaten face, and broad shoulders. He was wearing an old cotton jacket, a shirt with white buttons, and cotton trousers darned on the knees and tucked into canvas boots. And Maria Semyonovna had a wrinkled face, bowed shoulders, and large brown hands—a testimony to a long life of heavy and uninterrupted labor.

We all introduced ourselves and sat down at the table. Aleksey, sensing my curiosity about him, frowned and for a moment seemed rather shy.

But soon we were talking about matters that interested him more than anything in the world—love for other people, right and wrong, good and evil, faith and lack of faith.

And from his very first words, as I looked into his eyes and listened to his awkward, ungrammatical peasant speech, I felt what I had not once felt in the presence of the catholicos: I sensed that this was a man of faith, a man held by faith. I sensed this not from anything he said but from a sure intuition.

He was not trying to convince me of anything. He spoke with sorrow about people’s reluctance to follow life’s most important law—that you should wish for others what you wish for yourself; that you should wish good to others without exception, regardless of their nationality, of their wealth or poverty, of their faith or lack of faith, regardless of whether or not they are Party members. If you don’t wish yourself harm, if you don’t do harm to yourself, then you shouldn’t wish or do harm to others.

Aleksey Mikhailovich said all this with emotion, stammering, blushing, searching for words. There were drops of sweat on his face; he wiped his brow more than once with his handkerchief, but the sweat did not stop.

There was great power in his words; they were, after all, not the words of a priest in his church but the words of an old man who lived in a cramped and airless hut, an old peasant wearing a torn jacket and on whose shoulders lay the burden of daily labor. Neither this burden of labor nor any other of life’s hardships had diminished his inner strength.

His old woman and his daughter-in-law listened to him attentively, and from time to time they joined in the conversation; like Aleksey, they cared deeply about people’s goodness and the truth of their lives. And their faith did not exist somewhere outside their everyday life; it had itself become their everyday life. It was one with the borshch they cooked, with the clothes they washed, with the bundles of wood they fetched from the forest—with everything in their long hard lives.

And there was no trace in Aleksey’s words—which the women concurred with and which Ivan and the silent children on the stove were so alertly absorbing—of any kind of religious obsessiveness or spiritual grandiosity. They were just simple words about the need to feel pity for others and to wish for them what you would wish for yourself. They were words from life, not words from a sermon—words from the life these people lived here in this hut and the work they did day after day.

Nor was there anything conceited or hectoring about these words. There was only sadness, a sadness that no matter how simple everything may really be, people are unable to live well, according to the law of goodness and truth, but constantly fall away from this ideal.

I remember clearly how Aleksey, when he referred to lies, gossip, and all kinds of human wickedness, never condemned anyone but just said very quietly, with a frown, “It’s not necessary. No, there’s really no need for it.”

Then Ivan and I had some vodka together. With it we had some pickled cucumber, some
khash
, and some boiled chicken. But all Nyura gave Aleksey Mikhailovich was tea and bread. He drank and ate this almost guiltily, as if rather than being proud of his godliness, he was ashamed to be revealing it to others.

I asked him what he thought about the killing of animals, and he replied, “What can I say? It seems people can’t manage without it, but to go hunting for fun—no, it’s not necessary. There’s really no need for it.”

He looked at his son, sighed, and said, “My Ivan’s a cruel man.”

And Ivan said nothing. He too let out a sigh.

The longer we talked, the more moved I felt. I was not being inquisitive. I was not making mental notes of trivial details. I was gripped by a feeling I had not expected.

Meetings with famous people can—as we have seen—be disappointing. Someone very gifted, even a true genius, can turn out to be a very ordinary person indeed. His talent is separate from his soul. And you immediately cease to care that this ordinary, mediocre man is endowed with some particular talent that he displays elsewhere—in a laboratory, in an operating theater, on a grand stage, or in something he writes.

It is worse still when someone knows he is expected to display certain unusual qualities and knows that he does not possess these qualities; he begins to pretend, to play games, to act the prophet. This, of course, happens not with geniuses but with second-rate talents.

And then there are meetings like mine with the catholicos: Someone turns out to be intelligent, enlightened, and pleasant, but not of the caliber one had expected.

My experience today could not have been more different.

First there had been the steep streets deep in snow. This had been hard going, all the more so because of my shortness of breath, and I had felt cross with myself for agreeing to go and see Ivan and his father. It had all begun to seem pointless and tedious: I’d have done better to stay in the Writers’ Union house, play a game of billiards, and glance at the journal
In Foreign Parts
.